She was marvelling still, as the light faded from the sky. At the other tables everyone was speaking in hushed murmurs, as if they were in church. Only the little Indian girls seemed immune, and they presumably witnessed this scene every day of their lives.
As the first pinpricks of light glimmered in the darkening firmament Hajrija ordered another Cuba Libre, and thanked whatever lucky stars had brought her to Guatemala.
The transferred call from Uspantan reached Colonel Serrano’s home in the middle of the family dinner. He excused himself with some relief – one more argument between his wife and daughter about the latter’s lifestyle and he would seriously consider eating in the Palacio Nacional canteen.
In his study he listened patiently to Osorio’s angry account of the altercation with the Englishmen, then gave him a verbal rap on the knuckles. ‘Colonel Cabrera acted correctly,’ he told the younger man coldly. ‘We need the co-operation of the Englishmen, and that means we must take account of their sensitivities, no matter how misplaced they might be.’
Osorio said he understood that, but…
Serrano wished him goodnight and replaced the receiver, but made no immediate move to reclaim his seat at the head of the dining-room table. There was something seriously wrong with Osorio, he thought, despite the young man’s impeccable breeding. Or maybe because of it. The man seemed to have no centre: one minute he was turning to Evangelism, the next to pleasures which Serrano found dangerously perverse.
But he did understand Osorio’s anger at the Englishmen’s behaviour. The hypocrisy of it! When the English had colonized North America, the Indians had been virtually wiped out. In Australia they had left the native inhabitants to rot in the desert. In South Africa they and the Dutch had invented apartheid.
Serrano reached for his cigarettes, remembered he was officially in the middle of dinner, and put them back. If Guatemala had killed all its Indians the way the norteamericanos had killed theirs, then who would the Anglos in Hollywood have to do all their cooking and cleaning?
Razor and Chris were woken in the small hours by Gómez, presented with Colonel Cabrera’s compliments, and asked to be ready for departure in fifteen minutes. They cursed their way through the routines of dressing, weapons-checking and make-up, and emerged into the cold mountain air with a minute to spare. The same four trucks were waiting in line on the parade ground, exhausts spewing yellow smoke into the glow from the headlights.
Once again the two SAS men were gestured into the second truck, and within minutes the convoy was making its way down the hill and through the town.
‘They have found a guerrilla unit,’ Gómez explained in English.
‘Where?’ Razor asked, thinking as he did so that two days ago Gómez would probably have used ‘we’, not ‘they’.
‘In the mountains,’ Gómez said vaguely. ‘Not very far from the place we try the ambush. Maybe two hours in the truck, then an hour on foot.’
‘How were they found?’ Chris asked, but Gómez didn’t know.
The trucks rumbled on, bouncing the twenty-odd men up and down like a team of synchronized kangaroo-impersonators.
‘Why the hell don’t they use choppers?’ Chris wondered out loud.
‘Too noisy, maybe?’
‘This is quiet?’
‘Weather conditions then. These mountains always seem to be draped in clouds in the early morning – must make landings difficult.’
It was almost four o’clock when the convoy reached its destination, the front yard of what looked, in the dark, like a deserted estate. The company formed themselves into a column and moved off, heading across abandoned fields. Visibility was not much more than a hundred metres, confirming Razor’s hypothesis.
They marched for the hour Gómez had promised, and then for the best part of another. Most of the route lay uphill through forest, though sometimes they had to traverse bare and stony slopes. The temperature seemed to drop steadily as the altitude increased and dawn grew nearer. The mist seemed to thicken, though bare patches would still present themselves, allowing views of the long column stretching away to both front and rear. But for most of the time there was no real sense of the surrounding terrain: it was like marching through a cloud. Whoever their guide was, he probably deserved a medal.
Even on a bad day, Razor thought, the Brecon Beacons would have a hard job competing with this. He cheered himself up with the thought that the chances of their being ambushed by the guerrillas had to be pretty remote.
That optimism began to fray at the edges when the company reached its deployment point. ‘There is an old fort halfway up this hill,’ Colonel Cabrera explained to them, ‘and we have reason to believe that a unit of subversivos is hiding out there now.’
‘What reason?’ Razor asked bluntly.
‘There are several indications.’ He counted them off on his fingers. ‘One, we have satellite intelligence which points in this general direction. Two, there are reports of theft from a nearby village. Three, smoke was spotted early yesterday evening by a routine reconnaissance flight. Four, an informant has told us that this place is frequently used by the subversivos.’ He shrugged. ‘It looks promising, yes?’
‘Uh-huh,’ Razor said noncommittally. ‘Can I see the map?’
Cabrera looked slightly surprised by the request, but passed both map and torch to the SAS man. The old fort had been marked with a red cross, and two lines of approach pencilled in. Other lines, drawn in a rough circle around the mountain, apparently represented a perimeter ring. Razor checked the scale. The ring had to be at least two kilometres long, which was a lot of ground for, say, half the company to cover. And the contour lines showed that the slopes of the mountain were streaked with deep ravines, any one of which could offer an escape route for encircled guerrillas.
‘Are you going to wait for the mist to clear?’ he asked Cabrera.
The hovering Osorio gave the two Englishmen a pitying look. ‘We would lose the element of surprise,’ the colonel replied.
A few minutes later the two SAS men joined the rear of the right-hand column and began the ascent of the steep mountain path. It was now almost six o’clock, and the mist, though no thinner, was perceptibly lighter. As they climbed up through it, feeling like disoriented divers searching blindly for the surface, Razor began to feel his sixth sense twitch with foreboding.
A couple of hundred metres above them Emelia Xicay stared over the lip of the trench which she and Jorge had dug the previous evening. Visibility was less than thirty metres, but she had a perfectly adequate view of the path below, which narrowed to a metre or so as it wound between the steep outcrop and precipitous drop. The Kaibiles would have no choice but to climb this section of the path in single file, in full view of the two trenches and their four compa rifles. Always assuming they came.
For the moment she could hear nothing but the slight breeze in the trees behind her. Even the birds had fallen silent, as if they knew what was coming. She imagined the soldiers further down the mountain, slowly climbing the path. It had been Kaibiles who had killed her mother, and the thought of falling into their hands made her shiver.
She looked round at Jorge, whose face betrayed the fear she felt, and they grinned at each other almost sheepishly. How good it would be to talk, she thought. The previous evening the four of them had played tapes on José’s boom box and sang along as they dug the trenches, lit a fire and cooked a meal, talked and laughed…They had done all the things a compa unit could never usually do, and it had felt like a small piece of heaven, a small piece of ordinary life.
How much more of their lives would they have to spend in silence, in hiding?
She looked at her watch. In an hour or so the sun would begin to burn away the mist, and then they would have to abort the ambush, because there was no way they could hope to escape from the mountain in the full light of day. If the Kaibiles didn’t find them then the helicopter gunships would.
The path zigzagged across the forested slopes, easy
in some places, difficult in others. The mist was slowly suffused with daylight, but refused to lift from the deep ravines or the treetops. As always, Chris moved forward with one eye alert for danger, the other searching for birds in the trees. Behind him, at the rear of the column, Razor was asking himself why guerrillas would light a fire on a mountain. There were only two reasons he could think of. Either they were too drunk to care or they wanted to attract attention. And from what he remembered of the old man at Tikal the former seemed unlikely.
They passed a point which Razor remembered from the map, where the path took an abrupt turn and began following the contour across the slope. In a couple of hundred metres it would turn again, and resume climbing through a series of steep hairpin bends, eventually reaching the high valley and its ancient fort.
Abruptly, Chris stopped, and turned to face Razor. ‘Listen,’ he whispered.
Razor listened, but all he could hear was the soft footfalls of the Kaibiles receding into the distance.
‘No birds,’ Chris whispered.
Razor looked at him. ‘We’ve scared them away.’
‘They’ve been singing all around us since we started climbing – haven’t you noticed?’
Razor hadn’t, but he got the point. ‘I think we’ve gone far enough,’ he said.
The two men retraced a few of their steps. Where the path dipped into the ravine to cross the stream, they took up positions which would protect them from all but the luckiest of stray bullets, and waited. Less than a minute later the mountain above them exploded with gunfire.
It had been agreed in advance that they would allow twenty men to pass the rock at the beginning of the single-file stretch before opening fire. As luck would have it there was a long gap between the nineteenth and twentieth Kaibiles, and for several nerve-racking seconds Emelia waited for one of the other three to jump the gun. But then the twentieth man stepped into view, and the sound of all four rifles firing simultaneously was like an explosion.
Each of the four compas had been allocated five of the targets, and being the best shot Emelia had been given the leading group. The first man was easy, and he seemed to be tumbling backwards into the mist before she heard the shot. The second was just as straightforward: apparently paralysed by the shock of his comrade’s sudden demise, he stood stock-still long enough for her to put more than the one necessary bullet through his upper torso.
Then it got difficult. Her other three targets were moving, two trying to move up, one to head back. She took out the latter first, coolly knocking him back into the abyss. She felt completely cool, unhurried, dispassionate. The voice which said ‘they killed my mother’ sounded calm as a litany in the back of her mind – there was no anger in it, only justice. The fourth man went down on the path, tripping the fifth, who was still struggling to his feet when she sent a bullet through his left ear.
Beside her she heard Jorge’s gun jam, and the curse that followed. Three of his five were down, but two more were fighting their way past their fallen comrades. She took out the second, but the first reached the safety of the overhanging rock which marked the upper end of the single-file stretch. If he felt either brave or stupid enough there was now nothing to stop him coming up after them.
Or maybe he didn’t think it would be necessary. It seemed only seconds later that a grenade arced into view, clattered against the cliff face just beneath them and exploded in almost the same instant, sending up a cloud of rock fragments.
‘Time to go,’ she told Jorge, who was still struggling with his jammed rifle.
He nodded.
She took one last elated look at the body-strewn path and ducked back along the lateral trench which they had dug for this moment. She wriggled through the gap between the two boulders and emerged a couple of metres above the path, pausing for a second to make sure it was still empty.
It was. She leapt down, making sure she bent at the knees as she landed – this was hardly the time for a sprained ankle. Confident that Jorge was behind, she started sprinting down the slope in front of her, heading for the shelter of the mist and the trees.
She had only gone twenty metres when gunfire exploded behind her, and she whipped round to see Jorge collapsing on the path. She ran back up the slope, and was five metres from the fallen compa when the Kaibil loomed up between the rocks above him. She fired once from the hip, and it was the luckiest shot of her life, taking him right between the eyes. The Kaibil’s feet seemed to keep moving forward and he slithered over the drop and on to the path, coming to rest with his head in his lap like a broken doll.
Emelia turned back to Jorge, despair in her heart. Blood was pouring from a huge wound in his neck. She leaned the rifle against him and reached for a cloth to stem the wound, her ears straining for the sound of more Kaibiles. He smiled at her, and before she realized what he was doing, he had fixed one finger on the rifle’s trigger and manoeuvred the end of its barrel into his mouth.
‘No,’ she cried, but he pulled the trigger.
There was no time to feel or think or do anything. Sensing movement on the path below, she tried in vain to prise the rifle from his grip, crossed herself, and took off down the slope for the second time. This time she reached the shelter of the trees, but as she did so the first bullet ripped through the foliage above her head. She turned, sinking to one knee, and took aim just as the Kaibil jumped down from the rocks. He landed on both feet, and was bouncing back up when the bullet tore away the side of his head. Another figure appeared behind him, but ducked back after sending another shot into the trees.
At almost the same instant she pulled the trigger on an empty chamber.
Resisting the temptation to abandon the heavy gun – getting hold of them had probably cost compa lives – she resumed her descent of the slope, expecting more bullets to follow. But for the moment none did.
The ravine seemed further than she remembered, and the dreadful thought that she had somehow got the direction wrong began to take root in her head. Then suddenly the ravine was almost at her feet, like a river of mist flowing down the mountainside. She plunged in, and started moving downhill as fast as the uneven ground would allow.
All the gunfire had now died away, and she wondered if the other two had also managed to reach their ravine. Even if they had, there was still the rest of the day to survive inside the inevitable ring. But the positions had been well prepared – all they had to do was reach them.
And the four of them had killed at least fifteen Kaibiles. This was a victory to sing about, she thought, just as the arms reached out and plucked the rifle from her grasp.
Her heart sank like a stone. Not only death, she thought, but all the rest as well. There were two of them, and they were even joking about it.
But not in Spanish, she realized. She looked closer, and saw that one of them had the hair like a brush which her brother had described. Beneath the paint on their faces they were gringos.
‘Vas,’ the other man was saying. ‘Tu vas. Go.’
She couldn’t believe her ears, but the man was waving her on like the traffic policemen she remembered from San Cristobal. Were they planning to shoot her in the back?
‘Vas. Rápidamente.’
She did as she was told, looking back at the two strange soldiers, who turned away from her and started climbing out of the ravine, still clutching her empty rifle.
Razor was still thinking about the girl when one of Cabrera’s NCOs came to collect them, with the news that there was a body to look at. For a moment he had thought he was meeting Hajrija for the second time – the same long, dark hair, same dark eyes, same slim figure in an olive drab uniform. This girl had been smaller, and her face, on closer inspection, rounder than his wife’s, but even so it had been a shock.
And they had done the right thing in letting her go, he told himself, as the two of them followed the Kaibil up the steep path. The mist was lifting now, almost abruptly, as if its work of concealment was done. Two Kaibiles went past in the opposite d
irection, bearing a body of a comrade between them.
They climbed to the beginning of the single-file stretch and looked up at the rampart above. Half an hour ago, Razor guessed, the latter would have been close to invisible – the guerrillas had chosen their killing ground with skill. And killing ground it was: half a dozen bodies were still crumpled on the narrow path, and at least as many again could be seen at the foot of the precipice some twenty metres below.
The girl’s gun had been empty, and she had been alone, but it was hard to believe one rifle could have done all this.
Colonel Cabrera was waiting by the body. The young guerrilla had taken what was probably a fatal shot to the neck, and had apparently decided to speed things along by taking his own life. There was a gaping hole where the back of his head had been, and brains were splattered across the rock behind him. Yet the expression on his face was almost serene.
It wasn’t hard to guess why the man had killed himself. Razor imagined that being taken prisoner by the Kaibiles was about as life-enhancing as capture by bad-tempered nineteenth-century Apaches. And on this particular day, probably even less so. There was rage in the air all around him, rage that someone would be required to suffer for. He felt glad they had let the girl go.
‘Do you recognize him?’ Cabrera asked impatiently.
‘No,’ Razor said. ‘The man I met in Tikal would be about forty years older than this.’
The colonel snorted in disgust. The Kaibiles weren’t used to failure, Razor guessed. For the first time he understood how humiliating the mere existence of the old guerrilla leader must be for Cabrera and his men.
‘How many of them were there?’ he asked.
Cabrera shrugged. ‘Maybe twenty – it’s hard to tell. This fucking mist,’ he said, looking round at the sunlit slope.
Behind him, Chris was lowering himself down from the ledge above, having just been to take a look at the guerrillas’ firing position. By his reckoning there had been four of them, but it didn’t seem very politic to say so.
Guatemala – Journey into Evil Page 11